A Garden of One’s Own: The Ritual Consolations of the Backyard Garden

Dennis Hall

With the exception of watching television and possibly reading, gardening may be America’s single most widely distributed leisure pastime, certainly its most popular active hobby. It has been suggested that something l ike “73% d o enough yard work to consider themselves gardeners” (Heilenman 24), a figure that must include every conceivable, coerced as well as voluntary, exercise in lawn and houseplant care. More conservatively, American Demographics estimated in 1993 that the country harbored 61 million gardeners, who, for marketing purposes, fell rather neatly into four categories: the Dabblers, the 60% who are least experienced and committed; the Decorators, the 19% who love ornamental horticulture; the Cultivators, the 18% who love to grow and eat vegetables; and the Masters, the 3% whose dedication or addiction makes them an important niche market. Gardeners on the whole tend to be older, more affluent, and better educated than the average American (Waldrop, Yergin, Cook), and increasingly, possibly as much as 59%, they are baby boomers (Loro, Lasek, Beam).

Americans, of course, reveal their enthusiasms with treasure as well as time, and annual expenditures range from the National Garden Association’s estimate of a $23 billion yearly handle to one nursery industry consultant’s estimate of $53 billion (Discount Store News). American culture also weighs its passions in catalogs from W. Atlee Burpee, Stark Brothers, Walt Nicke, Smith & Hawken, Van Dyck’s Flower Farm, Klehm Nursery, Gurney’s Seed Company, Park Seeds, Stokes, Henry Field’s, Gardener’s Supply Company, Wayside Gardens, Jackson & Perkins, Rodale Gardens, Netherland Bulb Co., Thompson & Morgan, Jung Quality Seeds, Starlight Daylily Gardens, Miller Nurseries Brittingham Plant Farms, Old House Gardens, Johnny’s Select Seeds, Forest Farm, White Flower Farm, Bunton’s Seed, Ronniger’s Seed Potatoes, Daffodil Mart, Mellingers’, R.W. Munson, Pennington, Vermont Bean and Seed, and Kelly

Nurseries, to mention probably less than a quarter of the catalogs currently available. Perhaps more revealing is the trebling of the number of gardening magazines in the last six years to a total of something like 150 titles currently available (Beam), including home garden, Garden Design, Country Living Gardener, Women’s Day Gardening and Outdoor Living Ideas, National Gardening, Family Circle Easy Gardening, County Accents Gardening, Farmer’s Almanac Gardening Ideas, Weekend Gardening, Horticulture, Birds & Blooms, American Gardening, Organic Gardening, Countryside, Mother Earth News, and Better Homes and Gardens.

While the terms “garden” and “gardening” lend themselves to a wide variety of meanings, I want to set aside for the moment reflections on Eden or Xanadu or Versailles or Kew, and I would also like to exclude from present consideration all commercial undertakings and even domestic lawns and the “landscaping” that seeks somehow to perfect the architectural design of houses, big and small, the investment of $500 the realtors claim will reap $5,000 in next spring’s sale price.

Rather, I want briefly to look at the garden of one’s own, to focus on what most Americans recognize as the backyard garden, to consider the simple or elaborate cultivation of flowers and vegetables by householders for their own enjoyment and use in venues ranging from a few containers on the back steps of a housing project doorway or on the fire escape or roof of an apartment building to a lO’x15’ raised bed in a city yard to larger spaces on suburban half acres to fifty-foot rows on three to ten acre exurban “estates.”

The common explanations of backyard gardening spring readily to mind. Writing in 1977 for the USDA, Cecil Blackwell points to seven generally recognized values that in one combination or another will continue to drive the practice into the next century: saving money, freshness and quality, therapy or personal satisfaction, a family activity, the trend

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“back-to-nature,” artistic and aesthetic concerns, and neighborliness (2). These motives, however, at best only vaguely suggest possible meanings of the practice. Also common is the notion that gardening somehow represents a wistful glance back at American culture’s agrarian roots. While doubtless a species of nostalgia, backyard gardening does not have its most powerful resonances in agricultural practices that 98% of the American population has long ago given up and to which it has little genuine desire of returning, as the cooling of the back-to-the- land movement in the 1980s so clearly demonstrated.

Writing in 1994, for what I take to be a boomer audience, Diane Heilenman interweaves her practical gardening tips with epigrammatic suggestions of a more complicated account of, as she puts it, “the business of being a modem gardener, a role that has broadened in the late twentieth century from cutting the grass and growing a few tomatoes and dahlias to an entire lifestyle sometimes fraught with moral responsibility, social mobility, and political correctness”(viii). “Contemporary gardening,” she asserts, “is much more than stress-relieving activity for baby-boomers, although it is that, too. It is a symptom of a radically changing view of the human position in the world” (19).

This role and the views for which it is a symptom, I want to argue, are perhaps best understood in terms of ritual behavior. This impulse to cultivate the soil, often in circumstances aggressively hostile to the practical implications of the undertaking, is a ritual exercise and one of substantial significance in the postmodern era. The garden, whatever its venue, is space set apart; its cultivation is the “curious toil” of ritual activity; and the time devoted to it is that “time set apart” characteristic of ritual endeavors. Gardening signs a ritual process of making one’s self, of creating an identity, of good 01’-time self- determination. The gardening ritual serves to legitimate the gardener by creating a palpable sense of authority, constructing an “order,” and exercising power-processes that are now acutely felt to be less generally accessible to the middle classes in American society than perhaps they once were. To view gardening as ritual allows us to appreciate Heilenman’s evocative declaration that “the basic propulsion behind a garden is ego, a bit of stubbornness in the face of futility”(20).

Defining ritual is a complicated, contentious, and, on the whole, pretty unsatisfying undertaking (see Bell 69-74). Far more useful than niceties of definition, however, is consideration of what ritual

does and how it works. Rituals were once commonly thought almost exclusively to communicate important cultural information and to serve as agents of social control, as for example in rites of passage. Contemporary anthropological theorists, however, argue that communication and control are not the only, and may not even be the most important, functions of ritual, particularly not in twentieth- century cultural contexts. Ritual, Elizabeth Bell points out, “is not just an alternative way of expressing something but the expression of things that cannot be expressed in any other way” (Bell l l l) , and she concludes “that ritual practices are themselves the very production and negotiation of power relations” (196).

Moreover, anthropological theory now tends to see ritual activity as far more widely distributed in culture and to view the participant as far more active than in the past, a person inventing as much as transmitting culture. Ritual is always a matter of doing something in a specific context; ritual is not abstract and generalized. Ritual action involves one in genuine discourse, a dialogue, if you will, between such oppositions as, for example, the objective and the subjective, the community and the individual, conformity and resistance, subordination and insubordination-the action out of which society and self emerge. Ritual is a recursive cultural process, marked by complicity, resistance, and negotiation (Bell 191), in which the participant continually modifies and is modified by the cultural order.

Rituals, consequently, are processes of legitimation whereby the individual and the social “make sense,” “are explained,” are justified, and so emerge to be “taken for granted.” As Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman point out, the experience of “externalization and objectivation,” and some would add “naturalization,” which legitimate both individuals and their social world “are moments in a continuing dialectical process’’ (78). “It is generally well understood,” Bell points out, “that legitimation is one of the powerful things that ritual does” (194). Ritual legitimates principally through symbolic power, negotiates cultural “terms” through a process of, if you will, determining and saying what goes without saying, principally through the medium of human action and, significantly, without having to rely upon language.

Few American backyard vegetable and flower patches are driven by necessity or even convenience; the vast majority of North Americans can get better produce more cheaply and more easily at the

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supermarket or the roadside stand. Backyard tillage is aimed less at a fixed point than at the process of change itself. At risk of laboring the obvious, keep in mind that simply buying the necessary seeds, plants, and other materials will not yield a garden-much as the advertisers of such stuff would often have us believe otherwise’. When all is said and done, one must deliberate and toil, one must expend considerable amounts of time and energy; the extent of this consideration is a function of the size of one’s plot but also of one’s individual aspirations. And the regimen of digging, planting, thinning, cultivating, weeding, spraying, pinching, picking, and the like are necessary, though not sufficient, conditions of the garden, for, as Heilenman puts it, “gardens die when the gardener does (Sometimes earlier. All you have to do is go on vacation for a month in June)” (20). These recursive processes must be maintained lest garden revert to wild, culture give way to nature.

Gardening, like fashion, is firmly rooted in the temporal, thrives on constant change. And like fashion ritual, gardening is a sign of transformation. Fashion, ubiquitous in postmodern culture, is the driving force in the consumer economies of postcapitalism, which flourish on the traffic in signs, signs which promise to transform the consumer more fully through the act of buying than through possession or use. The process of change signed in the ritual of gardening, however, is closer to home, rather more intimately related to the primary means of any human production, than is the transformation sought in the usual rite of selling and buying in the secondary markets of human endeavor, whether at a farmers’ market, Walmart, or Nieman- Marcus. Nonetheless, gardening remains much like fashion and in much the same way may be taken as an image of society, of the self, and of the relationships between self and society. And gardening, although it seems to be governed by many of the same forces as fashion ritual, seems to be more subversive, even more given to resistance than complicity in its negotiations with the cultural environment of the 1990s.

Herein lie, I submit, many of the cultural satisfactions of backyard gardening, apart from the generalized benefits of economy, fresh produce, conspicuous consumption, recreation, sound health, concern for the environment, and the like. The effort to control nature, however narrow its scope, is an attempt to construct an image of the self and of society not as they are but as one would have them be.* Specifically, the survival and recent increase in backyard gardening is an expression of discontent not so much with the taste of one’s food or the appearance

of one’s yard as with the indeterminacy, ephemerality, fragmentation, and the rest of the confusion characteristic of the condition of postmodernity, and this despite the fact that the $23 to $53 billion spent to sustain this hobby is a fulsome embrace of the same material and cultural conditions that sustain postmodernity. Much the same might be said, not incidently, of the current passion for fly fishing.

I take i t as an axiom that the greater the experience of uncertainty, the greater the need for some sense of control, over one’s environment and over one’s self. Exercise of substantial control over one’s environment was once one of the privileges of middle-class existence. Indeed, this experience of control once distinguished members of the middle class from their inferiors, who suffered the restraints of poverty, and from their betters, who endured the restraints of noblesse oblige. As capitalism has gone to seed, however, the size of the middle class has exploded beyond its wildest fears, and the range of its control has narrowed to a degree unimaginable as few as thirty years ago.

Postcapitalism is erasing concrete differences in the ways people can live their lives, as it floods its markets with the ephemeral differences of commodified signs, produced and consumed not so much for their utility as for their power to signify. Having lost so much control of one’s environment to the culture of postcapitalism, to wrest a modicum of control over one’s backyard, once the limited refuge of the working class, is now an accomplishment aggressively sought by members of the middle class. Gardening, then, is a ritual exercise of control, carried out in the arena of one’s own space, which despite the mutability of growing things and their constant demand for time and attention, is a relatively fixed entity within the protean culture of postcapitalism.

And the current surge of interest in gardening is a form of nostalgia, but its frame of reference has more to do with the post-WWII era than with nineteenth- century agrarianism. Nostalgia is “not simply a longing for the past but a response to present conditions” and “is felt most strongly at a time of discontent, anxiety, or disappointment ...”( Hewison 45). Gardening displaces discontent with the postmodern rather clearly into a longing for the immediate past of modernism. Gardening’s gesture toward the modem follows what might be called a ritual logic; that is, it makes sense because modernism, whatever else may be said of it, signifies an individuated self, revealed in exertions of discretion, power, and control over nature, while postmodernism, whatever else made be said of it,

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challenges the very notion of a distinct self, exposed in exertions of paranoia, fragmentation, and unrelenting irony. The mechanical and botanical world of backyard gardening, where the intricacies of genetic theory have yet to intrude in any material way, is very nearly the antithesis of the electrical and computational universe of information and so serves efficiently as a ritual, a dynamic image of a modern resistance to the postmodern.

Moreover, backyard gardening may be seen as a ritual response to the communications crisis spawned by the postmodern traffic in commodified signs-its insatiable appetite for irony, penchant for jargon, addiction to textual looting, and indulgence of incoherence, The garden can function as a medium of expression free of the restraints and palpable failures of written and verbal language to communicate in the 1990s. The garden is, then, the text upon which may be written at least some plain talk, some language actually used by ordinary men and women (see Wordsworth, Norton I1 162). The garden provides an opportunity for a modernist text, one in which meaning, however narrow, is inherent, reliable, authentic. And the garden is a text whose author is palpably alive. Gardening demonstrates that at least some of the idols of the postmodernist marketplace can be replaced by the plain style of ordinary, concrete, human endeavor.

Finally, gardening’s ritual action allows people to negotiate oppositions, the stuff out of which self and society are constructed. As with any ritual, gardening will confront one with-how might one say?-the routine claims of the objective and the subjective, the community and the individual, conformity and resistance, but gardening is a ritual uniquely equipped to smoke out some of the oppositions that haunt people in the 1990s and with which they often would rather not deal. Diane Heilenman meditates on this theme with typical suggestiveness:

The nature of gardening is extremely complex. Perhaps the final lesson is mystical. We are part of circles inside circles. Gardening is a compromise between one’s ego and the genius loci. I have a theory that gardeners are imprinted with extra optimism as well as a special gene for seeing things as they are supposed to look instead of as they actually are. This affliction (I call it the Scarlett O’Hara syndrome) is why we are able to so long ignore the large and serious issues floating about the garden in the late twentieth century: chemical vs. organic, small vs. big, sustainable vs. spendthrift, bioengineering vs. conventional propagation, agribusiness and us. (19-20)

To this list one could add the organic and the mechanical, nature and nurture, the perennial and the annual, dwelling inside and outside, what is acceptable and what is perfect, quick fixes and long term solutions, errors and expectations (see Heilenman 13-16).

The backyard garden, then, is less an evocation of eden than a postlapsarian ritual exercise, an undertaking squarely within, yet clearly resistant to, the prevailing culture of the 1990s. The gardener’s curious toil may produce a few dozen tomatoes and a several bouquets of flowers, but it also contributes to the gardener’s charting of self and society on a plot very close to home.

Notes

‘Gardening and even the gardens themselves are syntagmatic rather than paradigmatic structures, more clearly founded in terms of what follows what rather than what goes with what. Gardening paraphernalia, however, is sold and often bought-especially through catalogs and magazines-with reference to gardening paradigms rather than reference to gardening syntagma.

2This is the golden world that the poet creates, the one that nature will not be at pains to provide, as Sir Philip Sydney explains in An Apology for Poetry (Norton I, 492- 93). And this notion of human art perfecting nature is, of course, the basis for much of the garden imagery in Renaissance English culture. See for example, the gardening scene in the fourth act of Shakespeare’s Richard II.

Works Cited

Beam, Cris. “Gardening Interest in Full Bloom, Thanks to Boomer Interest.” Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management 245 (15 March 1995) 24-25.

Bell, Catherine. Ritual Theory Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford, 1992.

Blackwell, Cecil. “Why Folks Garden and What They Face.” Gardening for Food and Fun. Ed. Jack Hayes. The Yearbook of Agriculture/l977. Washington: USDA, 1977.

Berger, Peter, and Thomas Luckman. The Social Construction of Reality (1966). London: Penguin 1975.

Cook, Adrienne. “Digging for Dollars.” American Demographics. 12:7 (July 1990) 40-41.

Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Vintage, 1973.

Heilenman, Diane. Gardening in the Lower Midwest: A

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Practical Guide for the New Zones 5 and 6 . Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1994.

Hewison, Robert. The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen, 1987.

Lasek, Alicia. “Superwoman’s Dead.” Advertising Age 6547 (7 November 1994) S-6, S-14.

“Lawn and Garden Sales on the Rise.” Discount Store News 33:lO (16 May 1994) 125.

Loro, Laura. “Catalogs Reap Rewards of Gardening Craze.” Advertising Age 66: 16 (17 April 1995) 32.

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, M.H. Abrams, Ed., 2 vols. New York: W.W. Norton, 1962.

Waldrop, Judith. “Garden Variety Customers.” American Demographics 15:4 (April, 1993) 44-48.

Yergin, Marc. “The Demographics of Gardening.” American Demographics. 7:4 (April 1985) 34-47.

Dennis Hall, Professor of English at the University of Louisville, has edited On the Culture of the American South (1996), a collection of essays celebrating the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the Popular Culture Association in the South and the American Culture Association in the South.